Rafael Yglesias - Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil

Harry opened the elevator door — it leads right into their living room. “I’m going, I’m going,” he said. He was in green nylon gym shorts with PAL embroidered on the side. His gray T-shirt had a hole the size of a quarter over his stomach. There was a volleyball under his arm. He entered the elevator as I exited. As he passed, he patted my shoulder affectionately. “Hope you’re here when I get back.”

I stood alone in the gloom of their living room. The lofts windows are at the front and back, leaving the middle untouched by natural light. Susan appeared from the kitchen area carrying a platter with bagels to the table.

“Sit,” she said as she went by.

The table was drenched by the sun. Gleams came off the silverware. My eyes watered and I longed for sleep. From my position in the shadows, a brilliant Susan poured glowing orange juice into a shimmering glass. She was a vision of goodness. A goofy goodness, however. Her hair, freed from its bun, spread out stiffly and unevenly. Her denim shorts appeared to be fashioned by her own hand, loose threads trailing down her legs. The white men’s dress shirt she wore must have been Harry’s; the sleeves were two inches too short, her thin neck was lost in the wide collar, and there was at least a foot of air between the material and her body. Still, she was an unearthly white, like the Good Witch of the Wizard of Oz, and the sight paralyzed me.

Noticing that I was stuck, she urged, “Come on.” I didn’t move. She put the juice down. “You did right by him, Rafe. I’m sorry. I know you hoped I would tell you that you did a lousy job, but you were good enough.”

“Good enough,” I repeated.

“Come and eat. Yes, good enough. At times, much better than good. Occasionally you were too casual. But you did a fine job. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

I trudged to the table and sat.

“You look terrible,” she said, cutting a onion bagel and handing it to me. It was hot. The cream cheese would melt, I thought, unhappily.

“I’m not sleeping well,” I said.

Susan slabbed a lot of cream cheese on a poppy seed bagel for herself. “I buy this low-fat cream cheese for Harry, so I have to eat twice as much. I hope that makes sense to you. Harry says it doesn’t.”

“It makes sense,” I said.

She speared slivers of pale red Nova with a fork and carefully arranged them around the hole of her bagel. She glanced at me. “You’re not eating either? No sleep, no food and what else are you not doing? Oh, that’s right, no human contact. Just living like a monk going over your papers.”

“What was my biggest mistake?”

“I’m not sure you made any mistakes.” Susan opened her mouth wide and took a ferocious bite.

“Come on. Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Why nothing about the prostitute?” she asked through the mouthful. She swallowed, gulped a third of her orange juice, and asked, “Why didn’t you challenge that?”

I opened my briefcase and took out my notebook.

“Oy,” Susan said. She put a hand on the cover to stop me from flipping it open. “No. Just talk. In fact, that reminds me. What was this with the taping? With your memory? Felicia still calls you Mr. Memory. What for? Didn’t you learn anything from Watergate?”

“I like to think Nixon has more to hide than I do,” I said. “I guess I was wrong.”

“Why the taping?” she insisted.

“The technology was there for legal reasons having to do with the kids. Parents often consult in that room and—” I reached for my orange juice, thought about taking a sip, and didn’t. “The technology was there. I suppose I could have … I didn’t like him!” The truth came out suddenly and surprised both of us. I think. “I never liked him. You remember what you’re interested in. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the banalities of his life. All I ever expected to hear — all I did hear, really — were the classic complaints of an excessively conventional middle-class man. A thoroughly civilized, timid, unimaginative loser.” I was almost shouting.

Susan took another bite. This one was smaller. She chewed thoughtfully. Sweat broke out from under my arms and at my temples. I couldn’t remember perspiring for the past week, although it had been humid in Baltimore. I drank my juice and waited for her. After she swallowed, she said, “You’re very angry at him. He really let you down.”

“Pathetic. Puerile. Egotistical. Savage.” These were all judgments of my anger at Gene, not disagreement with Susan. The reverse, in fact.

“Welcome to the human race,” Susan said.

For two hours, she walked me through my reactions to Gene, emphasizing not my therapeutic maneuvers, but the events in my life that coincided with their implementation. We found, as the case history reveals, that often I reacted to him as an analogy to what was happening to me elsewhere. For example, the decision to confront Gene openly with the psychic material of his dream as I, for Albert’s sake, chose to convert the clinic into full-time care.

“So I was wrong to interpret the dream so bluntly,” I said at the conclusion of her review.

“No, I don’t think you were wrong. Maybe you were a little harsh.” She changed her tack. “It was quite a brilliant interpretation.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. But I don’t think you appreciate how brilliant.”

“What do you mean?”

“You uncovered all this rage at women, at his mother, which is what he turned his wife into, as you told him. When his mother rejected him—”

“He rejected her. By marrying Cathy.”

“She felt abandoned. But Gene felt she rejected him. That was your insight. You said it yourself to him. She became a vengeful woman because she felt abandoned first by her husband and then her son. And how did he react? He wished her into the terminal. He wished her to die.”

My hands were trembling. I had drunk a lot of coffee since waking at four-thirty and that was part of the reason. Only part. Susan covered my shaking fingers with her hand and stroked soothingly. “You need some sleep. Some real sleep.”

“I should have known, that’s what you’re telling me. I should have known Gene might kill his wife.”

“No! He never battered her. How could you make that leap?” Susan slapped my hand. “You’ve got to stop trying to be the bad guy. You can’t get rid of all the evil in the world by swallowing it yourself.”

“All the evil in the world?” I repeated. “What kind of shit is that?”

Susan asked gently, “Don’t you believe in evil?”

“In what sense? As the missing mass of the universe? You’re not telling me Gene was evil?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what? When Gene killed his wife it was just an evil cloud that happened to rain on him? Evil is a judgment, Susan. To us, Hitler is evil. To a member of the Nazi party, he is good. You like cream cheese. Some people like butter.”

“You wanted butter on your bagel?” she asked, amazed.

“No! Of course not.”

“I didn’t think so. Look, I’m not going to argue philosophy with you, Rafe. I’ll get a headache. There was no way you could know he might one day make that wish to be rid of a vengeful woman into a reality. Everything was going wrong with his life. He’d been fired, he’d lost the woman he loved, his wife probably really gave it to him. What did he have left but his son? Oh, that’s a question. What’s your opinion of that relationship?”

“With Pete?” I drank more juice before answering. “Gene hoped to repair the traumas of his childhood by how he raised Petey. Don Kenny was emotionally distant from Gene. Physically close when he was young, which Gene repeated with Pete, by the way, and then Don was totally self-concerned once his career took off. In the end, it was the Jungian nightmare. Gradually Gene repeated his father’s pattern. Gene’s performance as the dutiful husband and attentive father was self-conscious. He really wanted to be a killer in the computer business and to have sexual adventures. When he first came to me he was living this lie, trying to make it up to himself for his father’s betrayal. I concentrated on letting him discover what he really wanted. Then it was up to him. He chose promotion and Halley over his wife and son. Is that evil?”